BEHIND THE TRAYVON MARTIN PSY-OP

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” — Edward Bernays, in Propaganda (1928).

“Professionals in my field work for a client. They put their finger on their client’s competitor and say, ‘This is the enemy. How can we paint him as a horrible cartoon?'” — Ellis Medavoy, retired propaganda operative — who is interviewed extensively in THE MATRIX REVEALED.

President Obama said if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin. Yes, but what would that son BE like?

Does that matter? Is it trivial? Is the distinction irrelevant?

This is the essence of the decades-long psy-op to convince Americans that their identity is completely wrapped up in their ethnicity, or their skin-color, or their religion, or their gender, or some other group of which they’re a member.

AS OPPOSED TO IDENTITY AS A FUNCTION OF WHO THEY ARE AS INDIVIDUALS.

Remember INDIVIDUALS?

That outmoded concept?

It’s outmoded for a reason.

It’s been scrubbed from the record.

Mass media can’t really deal with individuals. It’s not possible. Mass media can’t really get down to the essentials of what an individual IS. It doesn’t work. Putting too much attention on distinct and unique individuals, apart from stereotypes, would actually DESTROY THE WHOLE ILLUSION PRESENTED BY MASS MEDIA.

Mass media absolutely depend on cartoons and stereotypes and groups. Without them, the the whole industry would collapse like a stack of wheat in a tornado.

And as these cartoons are presented, day after day, the attention span of readers and viewers shortens. It’s all shorthand. It’s all shortcut. It’s all sketchy imagery.

And finally, we have a sitting president who goes there. Yes, Mr. President, that son would look like you, but who would he BE? Do you see the difference?

Heritage this, tradition that, legacy here, ancestry there, pre-racial, post-racial, it all comes down to the fact, whether anyone likes it or not, that the individual EXISTS, and no amount of false leads are going to change that.

The powerful group that emerged from the US psychological-warfare department, after World War 2 (see Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960, by Christopher Simpson, Oxford University Press, 1994), had to find a new role for itself, and it literally invented the (pseudo) science of mass communication research—bankrolled primarily by the Department of Defense and the CIA.

One of its jobs was the promotion of group stereotypes.

Mass communication research was touted as a new discipline. But it was quite old. Pre-WW 2, one of its leaders was Walter Lippman. Simpson, in The Science of Coercion, explains how Lippmann viewed the landscape as early as 1922:

“[Lippmann] contended that new communication and transportation technologies had erected a ‘world that we have to deal with [that is] politically out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.’ The ‘pictures in our heads’ of this world—the stereotypes—‘are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups…representing government [and these pictures] cannot be worked unless there is an independent, expert [elite] organization for making the unseen facts [of the new world] intelligible to those who make the decisions.”

In other words, since none of us will ever have a chance to meet the overwhelming number of people who live in the world, we’ll have to rely on stereotypes of them, and in this distorted maze, our esteemed leaders will have to take all their cues and knowledge from some collection of “experts” who interpret “real” perception and meaning for them.

A totalitarianism worthy of 1984.

In his chapter, “The CIA and the Founding Fathers of Communications Studies,” Simpson highlights the work of Hadley Cantril, who established the Princeton Learning Center, which morphed into a CIA-funded broadcast service. Cantril also assisted in reorganizing the US Information Agency (CIA front) under JFK. He invented a survey technique that “would revolutionize US election campaigns during the 1980s.” What began as a focus on US mass-communication ops abroad later came home to roost.

And so this universal psy-op has come to pass. It has thoroughly infected society, aided of course by media.

Groups define and oppose each other through images and cartoons and stereotypes. But it’s gone much further than that. The disease of group consciousness has pushed individuals into seeing themselves and presenting themselves as nothing more than group members. Proudly so. Absurdly so. They’ve tried to make the stereotypes into facts.

Some groups, in politicizing themselves, have ladled on the self-esteem routine to substitute for anything they might actually accomplish in the world, preferring to rely on slogans and assertions that amount to dust in the wind—actually torpedoing their chances of success.

It’s exactly parallel to the child who is told, in this case by his teachers and parents, that he’s very, very special, over and over, until the child is living in a never-never land.

Working for a definable cause as part of a group is one thing, but taking on one’s own identity as nothing more than “group member” is a disaster.

At the core of this op is desertion of self by the individual himself. Yes, every individual is unique. That’s true. But it has to play out. The individual has to take his own actions and his own path. If not, he picks out a disseminated cartoon, glues it to his face, and marches forward in lock step toward Nowhere.

So Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman become symbols of groups, and the hostilities broaden. And repulsive operatives who make their living pushing these symbols show up and do their work.

What’s the end game? A society fractured into opposing camps, your basic nut house, where every group ultimately looks to government for answers, money, help, favors, deals.

The psy-op moves all the way into dependance. And that was always the point of it. That was the plan for “reorganizing” a nation.

In the long run, those honorable groups who have labored for just change are forgotten. They fade into oblivion. What takes their place are the delusional ones, and the ones who are consciously run, from above, by planners who want to see this kind of mangled society.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It starts by saying the world, as it really is, is incomprehensible, and therefore we have to build cartoons of various groups; doing this is “a good idea” and it will facilitate our thoughts and actions. The prophecy ends with so many people buying into those cartoons that they play those roles to the hilt and assert they ARE the cartoons and nothing more.

But I’ll tell you this. Somewhere, lurking in the background, there are still many, many individuals who know they are individuals. And their day will come, because the universe of cartoon characters is such bad theater the show will close. Ticket sales will evaporate.

It’s important to understand the root: promoting a nation as a collection of groups. This IS Collectivism at work. Collectivism isn’t done by considering a country one homogenous mass of people. Not right away. First you need competing and hostile groups. You encourage them to present themselves as cliches, as animations, as actors in a play.

You move into phase two when you show these groups that their best chance of success is to get help from government. That’s the key. It doesn’t matter whether a group hates government. So what? You bring them around to thinking government is their best shot.

And, of course, government complies. Government holds out a helping hand. Money, hope, favors. You’ve now funneled the energy of groups right into the official bureaucracy. The problem solver.

You’re not, for example, telling a group it should start an urban farm and grow its own food. You’re not telling them how to start their own businesses and actually make them work. You’re not telling them how they can buy land and live in a community. You’re certainly not telling them the whole group concept is flawed and they should—each person—discover what it means to be an individual.

Individual power, action, vision is completely off the table.

These stereotyped groups are actually training grounds for membership in the bigger group: a whole society absorbed in government.

It’s all preparation for the ultimate lesson: the needs and demands and entitlements of the many obliterate the needs of the individual.

The word “individual” comes from Latin roots. In=not. Dividere=to divide. Individual=not divided. “Can’t be divided.” The individual is the fundamental, the basic. It’s what you come to, finally, when you analyze a group. The individual. It’s what you come to when you scrape away the stereotypes and cartoons and generalities and other “group characteristics.”

Of course, if you mount and push forward a psy-op that ADDS ON characteristics to the individual, especially if those characteristics are going to be self-sabotaging, andif the individual isn’t ready to invent his own future, he’ll bite. He’ll buy. He’ll join up.

This is what the “social science” of “mass communications” is all about. As the name implies, it’s an academic field that starts out with the assumption and lie of a MASS. From that point on, it’s all manipulation.

But why should people realize this? They’re floating on propaganda that lets them know the world is a horrible mess and we simply don’t have time to stop and consider the strange, outmoded, and discredited idea of the individual. In fact, wasn’t it the unbridled individual who led us into the mess? Didn’t “he” destroy the fabric of life? Didn’t he make millions of people starve? Didn’t he start all the wars? Didn’t he oppose group consciousness all along? Aren’t we, in fact, repairing the damage done by the individual? Isn’t he the ultimate virus that corrupts? Shouldn’t we wipe him out forever and install the Group as the indivisible unit of life? Then we’ll be happy. Then we’ll be free. Then we’ll all live in harmony. Then we’ll evolve to the next stage:

ABSORPTION INTO THE WHOLE.

You might be surprised at how many people want this. Economic absorption, political absorption, social absorption, mystical absorption.

Selling out Self is big, big, business.

I’ll leave you with this — as an illustration of how thick and dense group identity, as opposed to individual consciousness, can be built:

As reported by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal (July 14, 2011), the University of California at San Diego has decided to MANDATE a new graduation requirement. The key concept, the University states, is cultivating a “student’s understanding of her or his identity [focusing on] African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans or other groups [through the lenses of] race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.”

Translation: Through every means and category possible, we’re going to plug and wire you into a group, and from that platform you can continue the psy-op that pours all of society into the funnel of government and away from who you are: YOU.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com